Battling eminent domain abuse

Great to see the Institute for Justice get some well deserved press:

...the Ohio businessman who wants that land for a $125 million development, and for the city of Norwood, which wants that developer for the new tax dollars it hopes he'll bring in.

There's just one hitch: A handful of small businesses and homeowners don't want to sell. Earlier this week, with the help of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice, they took their case to state court, arguing that the designation of their neighborhood under the city's blight ordinance was a sham. ...

Alas, this abuse of eminent domain is part of a larger pattern across America. We've written about some of these cases before, most recently the effort by a California city (rightly thwarted by a federal judge) to condemn land purchased by a church so it could be sold to Costco. Last month in Connecticut, the state's high court narrowly upheld the city of New London's right to transfer its powers of eminent domain to a private corporation for economic development. In New Jersey, owners of oceanfront property in the shore town of Long Branch are fighting city efforts to take their homes and replace them with condos and townhouses.

And yesterday Michigan's Supreme Court reconsidered a controversial 1981 decision -- a landmark case in eminent domain law -- that saw the blue-collar neighborhood of Poletown condemned and delivered on a platter to General Motors. Notwithstanding the millions in taxpayer subsidies GM received, and the razing of 1,200 homes, the plant ended up delivering only about half the number of jobs promised.

Notice anything similar about all these cases? Whereas years ago the "public use" provision of the Fifth Amendment meant invoking eminent domain for, say, a highway or school, expansive court rulings now allow local politicians to seize private property from Citizen A and hand it over to a Citizen B they believe will prove a better class of taxpayer.

The slippery slope here is obvious. Because businesses will always pay governments more than homeowners (and large businesses will yield more than small), it's no coincidence that governments tend to invoke eminent domain powers on behalf of the rich and politically well-connected at the expense of the mom-and-pop shop or the family that simply wants to keep the home it's lived in for generations.